Something changed in me with my outburst at the fighting men. I had raised my voice and been heard. I had kicked the scrapping men and I didn’t feel at all ashamed.
I threw Drew’s mended coat back at him without a word and he accepted it meekly, almost cringing back as if afraid I might strike him again. Part of me thought I might.
Joseph asked me if I was all right and I replied that yes, I was. I was quite all right, in fact. I told him if the men started fighting again I would stop them again, even if I had to thrash them with a stick. My husband looked at me with rounded eyes but made no comment. I was given the first of the bark tea and Teer handed me a skewer of bird breast he had been holding over the fire. He served me and I took it.
I left them to their scavenging and their fishing and walked alone along the coast. The tide was out and I could step easily over the exposed rocks. At the end of a beach I followed what seemed to be a path up a small bluff, a gap in the low trees where feet had stepped before mine. The way led to a ledge of flat boulders above the sea, and the winter sun shone so brightly on the water below that I had to shade my eyes. I sat on some dusty moss and leaned against a rock, feeling, for the first time in so long, almost warm. Across the long arm of the harbour I could see Joseph’s boat bobbing close to shore; he and Hayman had woven nets out of flax and were trying to fish the rocks. Mr McClelland’s long figure perched at the stern holding the oars steady on the swell. It was the middle of July and I felt a change, knowing that the days would grow longer and winter would release its grasp. My belly rumbled and I thought it was the baby, a little body growing and sharing its heat with me.
It was a girl, I decided, a tiny thing, perhaps four months old. I pictured her curled there, the perfect child now the size of my fist, with her arms wrapped around herself as she slept. She had black hair and a pretty face and chubby arms. I rubbed my hand across my belly and felt a swelling. All of us often had swollen bellies full of wind, but this was different.
For a moment, I was almost happy. I needed to be happy, to be strong. To believe good things might happen. We might be rescued tomorrow. A ship might take us on to England. We might make it to Joseph’s home in Clovelly for when the baby came and we would wrap her in a woollen blanket and lay her in the crib that had been Joseph’s. And his mother would bake bread. The smell of it came on the wind like hope, and a song came to me, one of Mam’s Gaelic folk songs. I sang the first line, softly under my breath, “Bà bà mo leanabh beag …”
I felt the pressure of the words, of a song wanting to be released. I sang the line again, louder. I’d always sung with Mam but my father had discouraged singing. With the girls in the hotel I had sung about lovers and partings but only in our room, and quietly, mindful of Matron in the next room. Most songs I knew were lullabies or folk songs.
“Bà bà mo leanabh beag
Bidh thu mòr, ged tha thu beag
Bà bà mo leanabh beag
Chan urrainn mi gad thàladh …”
I sang it aloud, singing to Joseph far away across the water, knowing he couldn’t hear but wanting him to lift his head, to realise I was singing our baby to sleep.
“Dè a ghaoil a nì mi ruit?
Gun bhainne cìche agam dhut …”
Verse after verse, words so well remembered they drew me back to a childhood closer than the rocks on which I sat. The distant boat with the fishermen bobbed away around a rocky point and I couldn’t see them anymore. Had I really expected Joseph to lift his head, to hear my song over that distance?
I walked back along the shore, picking sticks for the fire as I went. Ahead, Caughey struggled up the beach with his head down, a bird draped from his hand. It was one of the white-capped albatrosses Mr McClelland loved so much, blood smeared down its long neck from a crushed skull. I hoped the thing was plucked and on the fire before the men returned from fishing so he wouldn’t know.
When I stepped up to lay down my wood on the pile I saw Caughey had dropped the bird and was standing with Teer, gripping his sleeve, a strange pleading expression on his face. He was not a man easily ruffled; he was young and strong and full of his own resilience. The only time he wore such a serious expression was when he was at prayer. The sight made me uneasy.
“Mr Caughey, whatever is the matter?” I asked, and immediately Teer swung his gaze towards me. Relief swept over his face. His grim expression broke at the corners and he smiled.
“Mrs Jewell. You have been out walking?” he asked, with Caughey still clinging to his arm.
I indicated the wood pile. “Collecting driftwood, as you see.” I stepped closer, wondering at Caughey’s haunted look.
“Is there any chance,” said Teer, and he looked handsome with his strong teeth showing white through the black beard, “that you have been singing? Pat has been startled by the voice of an angel, he says. Around the point at the end of the northern beach. A song so pure he is convinced God on high has sent an angel to him. Oh, you know what we Catholics are like, Mrs Jewell, filling the things we don’t understand with God. But here, look you, Pat. I do believe we have found your angel.”
I was mortified that I had been overheard with my sentimental crooning and my hands flew up to cover my mouth, but Caughey looked so confused and childlike as he realised how foolish he had been and I felt my eyes crinkling in a smile. I could have hugged Teer then, for bringing the gentle teasing of his friend into something light enough almost to resemble happiness.
Caughey’s mouth stretched long and then he began shaking with relieved laughter. “It was you, Mrs Jewell? The voice I heard over on the rocks, back there? That was you, singing as an angel from heaven above? I thought God was calling me. I thought my time had come.”
I nodded, embarrassed, but pleased to see smiles on their grim faces. “I am sorry to have alarmed you. I hadn’t meant to be heard.”
“Perhaps you have talents yet to share,” said Teer. He looked at me as if I wasn’t a burden and in return I saw not a hard man or a fighter, but just a man, with a heart and soul, same as everybody else.
I felt myself blush, and I turned away, back to my wood pile, where I spread the sticks carefully out to dry.
* * *
We had a song, the next night, by the fire. I had been sitting quietly next to Joseph as Peter McNevin took up a sailor’s tune about the high seas around the horn, joined by Ashworth and Mr McClelland adding a harmony blown on the whistle that sounded like the wind. A song together felt like a corner turned. They followed with an English song I didn’t know but some of the men sang along. It made a pleasant change from the fighting.
Mr McClelland had a folk song for us, and then he asked me, “Do you know ‘The Bonnie Burn’, Mrs Jewell?”
And he began a song I loved, about a man who leaves home and all his life is trying to find his way back to the river that flows past his door. I’d never sung it in English, but I knew the Gaelic. I was shy to sing in front of the men, but to my surprise Joseph told me to go ahead and Mr McClelland nodded to me across the fire, so when he began the chorus I joined in with my mother’s language, softly. Timidly.
Joseph’s eyes gleamed. I thought I might be embarrassed to sing like this, with him watching me perform for the men. Was I sharing too much of myself with them? I didn’t look at my husband, kept my eyes on Mr McClelland, who switched tongues and we sang the next verse together in Gaelic.
Later, in the hut, I was sitting up in my corner, waiting for Scott’s snore before I lay down to sleep. I’d laid a piece of driftwood between my feet and his head to force him away but sometimes I still felt him creeping up in the night, his fingers reaching over to touch my leg. I told Joseph I had placed the wood there as I was afraid of kicking Scott in the night. If I’d had any hope Joseph would have moved Scott without causing a fuss I would have told him the truth, but I wouldn’t draw attention to my vulnerability. More than anything I wanted the men to ignore the fact that a woman slept among them. I waited with my arms wrapped around my knees and dozed, running through the songs again in my head, glad for the fine voices of Peter McNevin and Mr McClelland and the lovely roll of a Highland song. Across the hut, in the darkness, I became aware of another waking breath. I had slept so long in the company of the men that I knew the pulse of their breathing. Someone else was sitting up. A bulk close to the doorway. Teer.
“That’s a fine voice you have, Mrs Jewell,” he said so softly I wondered if he could tell I was awake in the dark or if he was just talking into the night. “It gave me hope. Hope that, just maybe, you might save us all.”
A long while later, when someone between us turned with a grunt and a snore, I slipped down beside Joseph and closed my eyes.
There was a period then, a few days, a week perhaps, when the group was settled, no one was sick and the men worked together. The wind stayed in the west and there was no talk of taking the boats out onto the waves before the cliffs or the stupid dreams of diving for gold.
Joseph, who was good with masonry after his years in the mines, built a proper fireplace to hold the iron plate, and we had flat stones for cooking in the embers and a rack above for drying meat. We collected the bird fat in a pāua shell and used it to rub into our red, swollen fingers. I’m not sure if it helped the pain, but the imagined relief was better than nothing. Mr McClelland attempted to make soap from ash and fat. I’m sure all the men suffered, as I did, from raw skin where the salt encrusted in our clothing rubbed into open sores. I watched the experiments with soap eagerly, but no one had a recipe. Ashworth asked me if I knew how to make soap, but I told him I was a ladies’ maid in a hotel not a peasant.
“Shall we bring madam’s soap to her when we draw her bath?” He often mocked me, and I scowled back. With his high boots and fine clothes he thought he was a cut above everyone else, but for all his education and gold in the bank he ate with his fingers like the rest of us and I smelled the rot in his gums when he spoke.
Still, every day Ashworth and I worked together on our sewing so every man without shoes should have moccasins. The skins that weren’t soft enough to sew we put on the bed piles. I was given two long pelts that Teer had cured for me, thinly scraped and softened by pulling, rubbing with ash and washing in the sea, all together the softest we had yet achieved. He said I was to stitch them into a skirt. He’d stretch me another for a jacket. It was a fine gift and the thought of a new set of clothing kept me stitching long after my fingers went numb.
Teer and Caughey began the restoration of a second hut and their hands bled from the cuts of the tussock grass they used to thatch the roof. McNevin, bundling the tussock to pass to them, would catch in his singing whenever he was sliced.
“See afar yon hill Ardmore
Beating billows—yeow!—wash its shore
But—ach!—its beauties bloom no more
For me now far from Islay—arrgh!”
I watched the building, hoping there would be a space for me where I could live away from the men. I wanted to sleep without the fear of Scott’s hands.
Mr Brown sank into some kind of illness that none of us recognised or knew how to cure. I found him collapsed by the creek and called for help to carry him back to the hut. There seemed nothing wrong with him physically but he wouldn’t or couldn’t see us. He seemed to be living somewhere else, somewhere horrible, seeing other things. It wasn’t hard to guess where his mind had gone.
I was given the task of nursing him and I did the best I could with bark tea and kind words but lacked any medicines or skill. Brandy might have helped. When we were alone I sang lullabies to soothe him and he lay with the glazed eyes of a baby in a cradle. His neck was swollen and face puffy, his eyes bulged, but these ailments afflicted us all and we managed to keep our minds intact. He ate when I put food in front of him and could sit unaided, though he pushed me away when I tried to get him to stand.
We had no one with us who knew anything of medical matters, but Scott and Ferguson diagnosed bad food, or flux, or scurvy, which was stupid as his stomach was fine. It was his mind that was sick.
“He needs lemons and onions,” said Scott.
“That’s French nonsense about lemons,” said Ferguson. “He’s eaten tainted meat. One of the rabbits, perhaps.”
“We all ate them rabbits. He needs green vegetables.”
“Who tells you this? You can’t cure a disease with vegetables. It’s bad meat he’s eaten.”
“I’m a feckin’ butcher, you don’t tell me about bad meat. I skinned and cooked them rabbits and—” but Ferguson knocked him down with a shove and a curse and they continued their argument with their fists.
I ground my teeth at their stupidity. It was no good to talk about lemons and onions and vegetables. But I pounded fried seal meat to a paste, mixed it with fern root and pushed it with a flat stick into the man’s quivering mouth, rubbing his beard to force him to swallow. His eyes flickered but he didn’t seem to see me.
“I fed you like that, once.” I looked up to find Scott leaning in the hut doorway, his arms folded, and looking at me with that way he had. That intensity. I turned my back, crouching to feed Mr Brown, but every touch of his mouth on the spoon now reminded me of the day Scott claimed to have kept me alive with the tinned meat. It was a memory I didn’t want and couldn’t cut away.
We had all been living so long in such danger that our group fermented in a broth of obligations and duties and cares as we got through each day. All the tensions, each disappointment simmered; we lived so bound to each other and slept all packed together every night. I had no relationship with Scott that wasn’t true of any of the men and yet he treated me as if we had a special bond, as if he was entitled to speak to me with an intimacy that he wouldn’t have used in front of my husband. He assumed too much.
I wiped the dribbled meat from Mr Brown’s beard and stood to leave. Scott blocked the doorway.
I lifted my chin and glared at him, willing him to let me pass.
“Yet thy father were a bricklayer.” It sounded like a conversation he was having with himself, had been having with himself for a while. His nose wrinkled as if my standing before him offended him, but I wouldn’t step aside. Did he fancy himself above me and bound to order me about? My father managed a brickyard. I was certainly not socially subservient to Scott.
Footsteps crunched the stones on the path coming from the beach.
Scott stepped forward and shoved me against the wall, pressing himself against me with a violence that knocked away my breath. His hands grabbed and lifted my breasts through my dress and he dropped his face down to my bosom, his filthy hair in my face, in my mouth. And then he loosed me and a breath later, when Joseph stood in the doorway, Scott was kneeling beside Mr Brown, lowering him down onto his grassy mat.
“I’ll see to him now, Mrs Jewell,” he said with his back to me. “Thank you for the meat.”
I staggered past Joseph into the daylight and sobbed great gulps of air, spitting the smell and taste of Scott out onto the peaty ground, and then picked up my dirty hem and ran away, past Teer and Caughey at the wood pile, past Mr McClelland and Ashworth at the creek, and out into the dark and tangled bush.
* * *
The following day, Mr Brown came out of the hut. It was a miserable sleety morning and we were mostly huddled under cover by the fire doing our chores. He said nothing and made no acknowledgement that he had been sick; he just nodded to the party as if everything was normal, rubbed his shaggy hair that was now entirely grey and went off into the bush to do his business. When he joined us by the fire he took the tin of warm tea that Joseph held out for him and helped himself to the handful of shellfish baking on a rock. Cornelius Drew had placed them there, but he made no comment when his officer ate them.
He reeked of sweat and urine.
Teer, whittling sticks for the door of the new hut, paused in his work and watched Mr Brown, his forehead pulled into a frown. “Are ye back with us, Mr Brown?” he asked.
“As you see,” said the older man. He looked around with a clear expression as if he hadn’t been incapacitated for days, with me feeding him and the men leading him out for his shits. He looked capable enough, physically well.
“For how long do ye plan stayin’ this time?” Teer asked.
“I’m on duty now, Teer. When I feel the need to discuss my plans with you, you can be sure I will.”
He did seem to be well. He spoke mainly to his crew, with clear, sensible instructions: Ferguson, Drew, Morrison, Hayman and Sanguily took his orders easily. The other sailors, McNevin, Scott and Mr McClelland, seemed unsure, and, along with Joseph, looked to Teer when told to prepare to go out in the boat to set new lines. Teer nodded that they should do as they were told.
As they prepared to leave, Mr Brown beckoned to Scott.
“A word, Mr Scott, before you go out with the line.” It seemed staged: the men, standing ready, paused to hear the last word of advice. Teer, with his whittled sticks in a bundle to tie to the frame, waited.
It happened that I was standing behind Mr Brown, holding my sewing, waiting to take my seat by the fire.
When Scott approached the older man he was taken by surprise. Mr Brown had lowered his head and Scott stepped close to hear him. I saw Mr Brown take a deep breath and felt what was coming. He lashed out with a strong left hook, a sailor’s brawling punch that caught Scott on the side of the face, and I saw him crumple, his nose knocked away as he was lifted off his feet. He came crashing down in the ashes of the fire and Mr Brown stepped forward and stood over him as Scott sat dazed, his hand reaching up to stem the blood that burst from his face.
Mr Brown spoke quietly, so quietly that every man leaned in to hear him. “You touch Mrs Jewell again, Bill Scott, and I will peel off your skin and throw it to the gulls.”
And then he turned and strode off to the beach and the boats and the day’s work with the men running behind. Scott pulled himself to his feet and, dazed, staggered after them.
I didn’t see Joseph until late that afternoon. I had sat all day at my sewing, head down, listening to Teer and Caughey finishing the roof of the new hut and padding the doorframe with grass and peat. What did they imagine had passed between me and Scott, what did Joseph think? At the hotel there was an understanding that if a man had relations with a woman, she must have tempted him to it.
Always I had avoided any accusation of impropriety during my years in service, keeping distant, never alone with any man; the only man I had ever needed to report had been Scott, that one time, and he had been barred from the hotel as a result. Here he had compromised me again, making me look the temptress—an unlikely temptress, surely, with my thin frame, filthy knotted hair and a dress that had survived a shipwreck and been worn day and night since. My face turned sour at the memory of his hands on my breasts.
“It’s done, Mrs Jewell.” Teer stood before me with his hands clasped. “Pat is moving your pelts and straw across now. Your husband and yourself can have some peace for a couple of nights, then we’ll see what is to be done.”
His bulk was so powerful I couldn’t look up at him. I dropped my head in a jerky nod.
“Mrs Jewell.” He crouched then and pinned me with his eyes so I couldn’t look away. “I understand how difficult it must be for ye, here. It’s a rough place you’re sharing with us, all sailors ’n’ miners.” He tutted, a low clunk as if his very tongue was heavy. “Ye be married, and that’s all well and good, but a man will get ideas and you must stop ’em. Do ye understand me?”
I swallowed. I wanted to ask how I was to protect myself against Scott, who touched my legs when I lay sleeping and grabbed me when he thought no one was watching. Teer wasn’t telling me not to encourage Scott. He told me to stop him. I had no idea how to do that. I could feel my eyes welling with helpless tears.
“You’ll tell me, Mrs Jewell. Anything that happens by any of the men. If they behave in a way that does not respect your married state, you’re to tell me. Can ye do that? You trust me, isn’t that the way of it?”
I had to rub my cheek with the back of my hand to stop a tear from falling down onto my work—the sign of a woman’s defeat. He still watched me.
I sniffed, set my jaw and looked up at him. “Thank you, Mr Teer. I shall.”
He touched my cheek briefly, just the brush of fingers over a tear.
I felt the touch of him long after he stepped away.
My jaw was still set and my head up when the men returned. I gutted the fish they brought and rubbed them with the precious salt from the oven, and if anyone looked at me I returned such a steely stare they turned away quickly. Scott, with his horribly broken nose, stayed as far away from Joseph and me as he could.
That night we were watched as we went to sleep in the new hut, just the two of us, and I felt a surge of panic at the men’s eyes on me. In our communal arrangement, Joseph had been a barrier for my modesty between me and the men, but he had been no more than that. There was no intimacy, no inkling of that feeling that in our Melbourne days had him lifting my nightgown in our new marriage bed, and me shivering in anticipation for what was to follow.
Surely he wouldn’t expect to resume that here? And all the men knowing what we did and there being no other woman, would they turn that over in their minds? I felt my safety in this camp depended on my keeping my femininity closed down and giving the men no excuse to think that Joseph was enjoying something not available to them.
“All the time,” the girls in the hotel had whispered. “Men think about women in that way all the time. They just can’t help themselves.”
Was Joseph thinking it? There was so much I didn’t know about him, about men. I didn’t know about babies, either, and whether Joseph, should he insist on his husband’s rights, might damage it. I needed to know these things and there was no one to advise me.
Joseph closed the door to the men outside. It was the first time we had been alone, inside, in private, since Melbourne. Rather than being relaxed, the feeling between us was strained.
“Do you want to know why Mr Brown knocked down Bill Scott?”
“I am sure you did nothing wrong.”
“I did not.”
“I believe you. He was punished. I won’t let him bother you again.” Joseph was pulling the bedding piles together, the skins now side by side.
I wanted to shake him because he missed the point, understanding nothing because he didn’t ask me. It wasn’t just Scott’s grabbing that had hurt me but the suggestions that came with it, the men thinking that I had played him along. Once the men decided I wasn’t united with Joseph I was frightened others might try their luck.
“You can take your dress off now,” Joseph said, but I wanted to leave my clothing on. I imagined my body underneath: raw from the salt rash and slashed with grazes, stick thin with a swollen belly where the baby grew. My dress had become my skin and I needed its protection.
“I’m too cold.”
“I’ll warm you.” He sighed when I shrunk back. “I’ll just hold you, Mary. I’ll not do anything else. Take your dress off.”
The hut was dark. An orange sheen from the fire flicked through a gap by the roof but gave no light below the ceiling. He wouldn’t see my body, but he would feel it. I held my hands against my stomach and the swelling was there, real. I left my dress on and laid down beside him, my head on his outstretched arm and my back nestled into his side.
I wanted him to ask: What is it? Why are you troubled? so I could tell him. A baby was an impossible subject to raise without being invited to tell. If he asked me anything, I would tell him. But Joseph didn’t ask. He lay there in his heavy state and eventually I fell asleep with his warm body against my back. It was the first deep sleep I had had since landing on the island and I woke warm and rested.
When Joseph and I came out of the hut in the morning, the men cheered. Mortified, I went back inside.
* * *
Scott found me the next day working by the fire. Allen and Joseph had been there, but Joseph had stepped into the forest for a moment and when I looked up Allen was nowhere in sight. Scott stood with bowed head and hands clenched before me. I could hear Teer and Caughey on the other side of the huts.
I was on the edge of calling out, but Scott’s face was still swollen with Mr Brown’s punch and he looked thoroughly miserable. I waited, wary, to hear what he had to say.
“Mrs Jewell, I am so terribly sorry.” I had never heard him speak in such a way before, with painful humility. “My behaviour was inexcusable. A form of madness, some will other than my own took control of my senses. I deeply regret what happened. I apologise unreservedly. It will never happen again.”
He spoke in one long stream and then was away, walking quickly around the huts to join Teer and Caughey, so when Joseph returned I was staring into space.
“Mary?” Joseph said, and I looked around. For a second I didn’t recognise him. I hadn’t looked at him properly for weeks. How wretched we had all become. How gaunt.
He sat next to me and reached for my hands, which lay listlessly on my lap, my sewing dropped. His long face was dirty and his hair fell in a tangled sheet into an equally wild beard. There was so little of him to see. But my thoughts were muddled and not on Joseph. Was it true that madness had taken Scott? Why would he grab me in such a way and regret it so? Joseph lifted my hand and bent his head over it. Did Scott’s avowed apology mean I was safe from him at last? Joseph kissed my hand. I don’t know why he did it. I had to believe Scott was sincere, that there would be no repeat of his grabbing hands. I glanced at Joseph, but decided against telling him. He looked as if he had been crying.
Allen came back and we all picked up our work, but I ran those two things through my head all day—Scott with his apology and Joseph kissing my hand. They were both so unlikely and I couldn’t make sense of either.
Mr Brown’s mood revival lasted a day or two but then he slowly sank again. This time he didn’t take himself back to bed but his despair hung around him all the time; always with the risk of it wrapping around his mind and pulling him down. Mostly he lived in the halfway place, and I couldn’t tell if he was seeing the world in front of him or some unreal imagining. When he was lucid, often it was worse. He disagreed with everything Teer suggested as if the challenge to his authority needed to be stamped out, when Teer was only being reasonable and trying to get things done.
“No,” he said, when Teer asked if he would make up a party to look for goats.
“Why will you not?”
“I’m taking the men for firewood up the valley.”
“We’ve enough firewood for several days. Meat is more important.”
“I said no, Teer.” Mr Brown would then select a party of men to go to the forest, always the sailors trained to obey a senior officer. Even they went with him reluctantly.
He argued with Teer over the importance of fish hooks and nets and about sending parties inland for signs of pigs, or out to the island for rabbits and goats.
And then later, when Caughey had cornered and almost captured a kid goat on Enderby, “We should all go to catch it,” Teer said to Mr Brown. “A tethered kid will lead to the mother.”
“No.”
“A milk goat. You’ll not object to that?”
But then Mr Brown switched the topic entirely and laid out his new plan for us all.
“I’ve decided we will all go south, to Musgrave’s camp.”
My hands were poised above a mound of blubber. Teer had dumped the skinned seal on the flat rock where we processed the meat, leaving me with a gully knife and the carcass, its pale jellied insides bare to the sky. He faced Mr Brown across me, both standing with their hands on hips. I scraped the knife against the whetting stone and made no pretence of ignoring them. If I worked like a man I could listen in to the men’s talk.
Teer paused for a while and I didn’t like the way his eyes narrowed. “Where’s the advantage in that?”
“It’s a bigger camp. Sheltered. Seals on the rocks at the end of the bay. Pigs, perhaps.” Brown didn’t look at Teer when he spoke. He showed his dislike of the big Irishman by such discourtesies.
“No. Our only hope is a passing ship, coming in for water or repair. They’ll come in at the north. Musgrave’s is too far south.”
“Musgrave’s is a known location, on the chart.”
“Known to be deserted.”
“I’m not going to argue with you, Teer. I’m not telling you this for discussion. I’ve made the decision that we can survive better at Musgrave’s. We’ll take what we can from here and leave tomorrow, if the sea stays calm.”
Teer whistled out a long breath and his fingers rolled into balled fists.
They were butting heads like senseless goats and I wanted to draw my foot back to boot them as I had Allen and Drew.
Teer turned a deliberate look towards me. God knows I looked savage, in my new sealskin skirt and jacket and my hand wrapped around a bloodied knife. Mr Brown followed his gaze slowly and he focused his eyes. It was the first time since punching Scott that he paid me any mind, and his look was so heartbreakingly melancholic I felt ashamed at my anger at him. He was a sad old man, who had been on his last run home with his wife, ready for retirement and a garden and a pipe, and now his life had sunk and left him with this reality: fifteen souls washed ashore on a rock in the bleak Southern Ocean. He had lost more than a hard man like Teer would ever know. There was no coming together between these two men, no stepping back or giving in.
I began to hack at the blubber and tore off large strips that I would later smoke over the fire to preserve.
* * *
I was not surprised when they announced a split the following day. It had been building for a while between Teer and Brown and their factions.
Brown and his sailors would take one boat south to Musgrave’s, and Teer’s party would remain behind with the second.
I was loath to split the group. We were so few and so desperate. I felt our only chance for survival was to stay together and combine our energy and our skills, look after one another, help each other. If we couldn’t manage that common decency, what were we? Surely the threat of death that hung so close over our heads all this time was enough to persuade two stubborn men to find a way to work together to keep us alive?
It wasn’t to be. The sailors packed stores of smoked and salted meat into the boat.
Teer asked for the glass bottle that I had hidden all these weeks. I took several breaths before I went to fetch it. It had become a precious thing to me that I would hold and rub when I needed the feeling of something real, something beautiful made by the hands of men.
When I came back Caughey was holding Teer’s arm, restraining him, and the pair were arguing.
“Let her keep it, she has little enough,” Caughey said and turning to me said, “No, Mrs Jewell, we won’t make you part with it. You must have it.” And then to Teer, “It’s a small thing. Please.”
Teer shook his friend’s arm off and snatched the bottle from me without looking at either me or Caughey. He gave it to Sanguily to fill and stopper and put in the boat. I knew a bottle of fresh water at sea could save a life. I kept my eyes on the sand and said nothing.
“You cold-hearted, pig-headed, scurfy, bleeding bastard!” shouted Caughey. “Why do you always have to—” but Teer grabbed him by the scruff of his jacket and dragged him in.
“You are one word away from getting in that boat, do ye hear me, Pat? You think I don’t see you? Admiring her?”
He pushed his friend away and when a button flew off and bounced across the shingle I stepped between them and bent down to pick it up.
“If you give me your jacket tonight, Mr Caughey,” I said, with my back to Teer. “I’ll stitch this back on for you.”
I wasn’t sad to see Morrison throwing his skins into the boat. He was clumsy with his actions and words. Ferguson was a good worker but argumentative. Many fights started with the pair of them. Cornelius Drew was gentler than most but dreamy and one of the least able of the men. Peter McNevin was nimble and intelligent but I’m sure they took him mostly for his singing. He had lifted our spirits on many occasions. But when Mr McClelland walked past, I cried. He had suffered since the first trip down to Musgrave’s—his teeth were loose so he ate little, and the weight had dropped off leaving him scarecrow thin. He looked every day of his sixty years. “Must you go, Mr McClelland?” I asked. “I would far rather you stayed here.” I wanted to add, where I can look after you, but he was no relation and I had no right to him.
He took my hands and shook them gently. “Sweet child. I will pray for you and we’ll meet again when a ship comes. You’ll watch out for my birds, won’t you—parakeets, you remember? Yellow-crowned, please, if you can. And don’t let these fools eat any more albatross unless you are starving and your life depends on it. It’s terribly bad luck.”
He gave my hands a squeeze and turned his clouded eyes away. He climbed into the boat, wincing with the pain of his swollen and disfigured limbs—just a touch of the scurvy, he said. I bore witness to his suffering and there was nothing I could do. He didn’t see the smile I tried to send him away with. He couldn’t see farther than the ends of the oars.
The final man of the seven was Sanguily, and he went with obvious reluctance, preferring to stay with Teer. I would gladly have swapped him with Allen, who had no love for me. Or Bill Scott, who had perhaps too much. But no one asked my preference and I stood dumbly by Joseph’s side.
Sanguily had hollow pools where my ripped petticoat revealed his collarbones and his arms were thin wires, but he lifted his oar as strongly as any of them and had his precious jacket folded under him while he rowed, keeping it safe. “Goodbye, Mrs Jewell,” Sanguily called as they pulled away from the shore. “God bless you and keep you safe until we return!”
They rowed up the harbour to became a distant dot, a bird on the water.
It had been decided in a rare agreement between Teer and Mr Brown that no attempt would be made on the wreck of the General Grant, and that if no rescue came by the year’s end we would reunite and attempt our own rescue. I didn’t tell them my lonely secret. Sometime near the new year my baby would arrive. I couldn’t birth a baby on my own. Joseph would have to pull it out of me and the thought set me shuddering. He’d need to borrow a gully knife to cut the cord but I had never seen it done. I had heard the words but didn’t know what they meant. I dreamt of the thick mooring lines that tied a ship to the pier, and Joseph hacking at them with a blunt knife to set the ship free.
I sat on the gutting rocks with my jacket wrapped across my distended belly and looked down the harbour to the channel to the sea.
Mr Brown’s rescue plan was not complicated. We were to fit out one of the boats with sealskin sails and provisions and strike out towards New Zealand, as Musgrave had done. On the open sea. It was as mad as it was simple. Mr Brown was the only one among us who had studied a chart of the Southern Ocean, but when Mr McClelland had asked him the distance and bearing of New Zealand he couldn’t remember or had never known.
“If they find one of the castaway depots, there’ll likely be a chart,” Joseph said, “An experienced mate like Mr Brown won’t go to sea without a bearing.”
But who knew what Mr Brown might do?
Across the harbour, Enderby Island blocked our view to the north and the ocean that lay wide open from Australia to Chile and beyond. Even with a chart, what were the chances of finding New Zealand in all that sea? And who would volunteer to go?